Posted
by
samzenpus
on Sunday July 21, 2013 @07:40PM
from the want-to-play-a-game? dept.

Lasrick writes "The brilliant Alex Wellerstein has an interactive map that shows the effects of a variety of atomic bombs on whatever city in the world you choose (you can designate the yield or choose from a wide variety of pre-programmed yields, like Fatman, Little Boy, or what the Soviets had at time of the Cuban Missile Crisis). Compelling in a scary sort of way. A 3D version is available."

Meh. He knows someone will retaliate, and it'll end up wiping out enough citizens to significantly hurt the corporate base of power in the U.S. If a significant portion of the population is dead, we can't exactly go out and buy stuff, can we?

I'll agree, looking at the behaviour of Kennedy before election (huge missile gap lie) right up to the Cuban missile crisis definitely drags it back that far. You don't even have to look that hard at Ford, Nixon and Johnson to find problems there. Anyone want to give an example before Kennedy?

And some multinationals continued those business relationships between 1939 and 1945, or nominally severed the relationship with their subsidiaries in those countries and then collected the profits after the war.

Big business is only loyal to profits. Flags, ideals, countries, and people are secondary concerns at best.

And some multinationals continued those business relationships between 1939 and 1945, or nominally severed the relationship with their subsidiaries in those countries and then collected the profits after the war.

And just think, without WW2, Fanta would never have been developed [wikipedia.org]! What kind of a world would that be?

Depends how you do it, doesn't it? For example, the US has several divisions of power, federalism and the breaking of the national government into legislative, executive, and judicial. And other democracies have similar setups (a common additional division being separation of executive powers to a head of state and administrator).

I see need for more divided power as the size of the group increases. So there's not much need for divided power in a small family grouping (though traditional families have two

I guess that means that relationships with ideological opponents based on trade don't always work out. Well, Russia that has been reverting back to Soviet style nuclear sub and bomber patrols of NATO countries and the US, with the occasional threat of nuclear attack. China has been rapidly increasing its defense budget, is planning to build multiple aircraft carriers along with a blue water navy, is threatening its neighbors and trying to take land from them. Maybe the US shouldn't draw down its military

The US could reduce its war toy budget by 70 percent and still spend more than Russia and China combined. We could reduce it by 80 percent and still be spending far more than the next closest (Russia), to defend less than half the territory. That's only the official budget, plus there's the unconstitutional Black Budget, the alphabet soup of the intel agencies, and the several hundred thousand mercenaries that we pay for.

The reality is that the US is not under threat of invasion from any foreign power,

Just that this time, it's you Americans who are the warmongering expansionist extremist crazy country.

Yep, to us Europeans, you're worse than Russia and China. Combined, even.. I think only North Korea or Pakistan can still beat you. But Pakistan doesn't have a big lead on you, to be frank.

And I'm a European who usually defends the USA by saying that one can't generalize this, since there are a lot of great people in the USA too. But honestly, that's true for Pakistan and North Korea too. It's always the fe

My expectations are simpler than all out war. At some point a terrorist group will manage to get their hands on a nuke. The easiest delivery method is cargo container. One day, one of our ports is going to disappear. I hope I'm wrong...

My expectations are simpler than all out war. At some point a terrorist group will manage to get their hands on a nuke. The easiest delivery method is cargo container. One day, one of our ports is going to disappear. I hope I'm wrong...

You are wrong. The worst a terrorist is ever going to be able to do is a dirty bomb - basically a bunch of C4 next to the radioactive material. The bomb will spread radiation across one or two city blocks and that's about it.

The reason that they will never actually detonate a real nuke is that they are complicated and extremely delicate. The shape of the bomb must be absolutely perfect and the timing of the charge detonations must be accurate to within microseconds, else nothing happens. Getting the shape right is so important that people working on at least one major nuclear programat Los Alamos had to classify all spheres, including oranges. [nuclearsecrecy.com]

It will take the resources of a nation-state to blow up a nuke on US soil and no matter what any war-mongering politicians have said, no actual nation-state is stupid enough to do that because it means the end of that country. Not Iran, not North Korea. Not going to happen.

Pakistan. Should an islamic revolution take over the military, I fully expect a bomb to go "missing" only years later to be found exploded on US or European soil. Of course, not by Pakistan, but by some Islamic fuck looking to jihad himself to paradise.

The main fear for nuclear terrorism is not that they build their own bomb, but rather that they get one thru stealing/corruption/or jsut plain buying from the soviet or other state with nuclear weapon. Can you be sure that nuke from,say , France are as secure as the US one against stealing ? Now repeat the same question with say, Pakistan or India ? That's the real deal. If nuclear terrorism ever happen, it will be that way.

But far more likely before nuclear terrorism will be bio-chemical terrorism whi

The main fear for nuclear terrorism is not that they build their own bomb, but rather that they get one thru stealing/corruption/or jsut plain buying from the soviet or other state with nuclear weapon.

That is what I was talking about. Those nukes are not designed for shipping-container delivery. So buying one on the black market isn't going to do them any good. They might get all the pieces but they won't be able to make it go boom. This isn't the kind of thing they can just MacGyver up, especially without test runs.

A Little Boy design requires an artillery tube and regular explosive. It can be built from a standing start with 1940s technology and is so straightforward the Manhattan Project didn't need to test it.

It requires a *lot* of bomb grade material. The hardest part of making a bomb, is bomb grade material by a long shot. Microsecond timing is easy these days, your computer, cell phone and even that AVR has timing that accurate. These days once you have the material there is not much hard about a bomb. So a implosion device is almost certainly what would be used.

You are wrong. The worst a terrorist is ever going to be able to do is a dirty bomb - basically a bunch of C4 next to the radioactive material. The bomb will spread radiation across one or two city blocks and that's about it.

The reason that they will never actually detonate a real nuke is that they are complicated and extremely delicate. The shape of the bomb must be absolutely perfect and the timing of the charge detonations must be accurate to within microseconds, else nothing happens. Getting the shape right is so important that people working on at least one major nuclear programat Los Alamos had to classify all spheres, including oranges. [nuclearsecrecy.com]

It will take the resources of a nation-state to blow up a nuke on US soil and no matter what any war-mongering politicians have said, no actual nation-state is stupid enough to do that because it means the end of that country. Not Iran, not North Korea. Not going to happen.

I don't know about that. Most of the problems in shaping it comes down to having the machines to craft and shape the bomb to tight tolerances. We've been able to keep the machines that can make objects and refine materials with such tolerance out of foreign states for the most part. That's what has saved us as much as anything. The math is pretty much out there in the open to a degree.
With 3d printing and 3d shaping (lathes/cnc/etc) I don't think we are far from being able to shape any material into any s

If you could get isotopically pure Pu-239, which doesn't exist, it would work - but even the tiniest traces of Pu-240 will spoil it. Quoth Wiki: "The presence of the isotope plutonium-240 in a sample limits its nuclear bomb potential, as plutonium-240 has a relatively high spontaneous fission rate (~440 fissions per second per gram—over 1,000 neutrons per second per gram),[20] raising the background neutron levels and thus increasing the risk of predetonation."

You can make a gun-type bomb with impure plutonium, what you can't do is make one short enough to deliver in a missile or a plane. Built diagonally on the 100th floor of an office building or more feasibly at ground level in a dockside warehouse however....

You "just" need to increase the assembly velocity, and there are ways of doing that which are simpler than building an implosion device. And as you point out a fizzle is still a significant yield, and much dirtier.

Allowing them to close completely could result in the instantaneous formation of a critical mass and a lethal power excursion. Under Slotin's unapproved protocol, the only thing preventing this was the blade of a standard flathead screwdriver, manipulated by the scientist's other hand.

My jaw is on the floor. If I believed in reincarnation, I would be looking to find his soul having cropped up somewhere in appalchia where he is now chain smoking cigarrets while distil

yes.. soon citizens from all three nations can have the oppressive, paranoid, and freedom leeching state of the soviet union, the thankless slave lifestyle of the average chinese, and the corporate greed of america, I can't wait!

Hardly. The Chinese and Russians *tolerate* the US only to the extent that money makes it necessary. When money becomes a problem, things get ugly. Especially if it means the demise of your civilization. Then, leaders tend to get desperate. Case in point, DPRK however you've probably forgotten already.

Christ, it really puts into perspective the rate at which these things have gained destructive power since their inception. The difference between the effects of "Little Boy" and the Tsar Bomba on Hiroshima are...jarring.

Oppenheimer's pith, poetic, and prophetic "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" makes for a great quotation, but it probably has as much to do with the original text as say, the King James Bible.

The massive bombs are all products of the 50s and early 60s. Once the law of inverse-cube was observed with huge fucking explosions that vaporized atolls in the south Pacific, they figured out that you could make a more reliable, stable, less expensive, and far more effective small warhead in the 300 - 500 Kt range. Oh, and since we developed lifters capable of hauling those big dick nukes, we could put 3 - 10 of the smaller more effective ones on there.

The EMP and radiation would wipe out the television transmission for several moments following the blast. I'm pretty sure all the archived footage was shot with film which is a chemical process because of that.

And yes, tube technology was far more resilient to an EMP compared to transistor (let alone micro chip). Again, it was a signal transmission issue upon detonation. A blackout period.

You mean by following his travels? That might be OK so far, but I doubt he'll make it to Iran or North Korea.

But since in recent years both Chinese and Russian officials have threatened nuclear attacks against the US and its armed forces, or against NATO forces as well in the case of Russia, there is some validity to that.

No, he's just another threat. But he could make the other threats more dangerous. The US relies upon the NSA to avoid another Pearl Harbor. The information Snowden stole can show governments and organization that are adversaries of the US how to avoid or minimize the chances of detection by the NSA, and perhaps more. His four laptops of secrets are said to be extremely damaging. The revelations Snowden has made have already resulted in reports of terrorist groups changing their communications methods

Outside the US, both established and emerging nuclear powers increasingly see nuclear weapons as weapons that can be used in a controlled, limited, and strategically useful fashion, said Barry Watts, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, arguably the Pentagon’s favorite thinktank. The Cold War “firebreaks” between conventional and nuclear conflict are breaking down, he wrote in a recent report. Russia has not only developed new, relatively low-yield tactical nukes but also routinely wargamed their use to stop both NATO and Chinese conventional forces should they overrun Moscow’s feeble post-Soviet military, Watts said this morning at the headquarters of the Air Force Association. Pakistan is likewise developing tactical nukes to stop India’s much larger military. Iran seeks nuclear weapons not only to offset Israel’s but to deter and, in the last resort, fend off an American attempt to perform “regime change” in Tehran the way we did in Baghdad. The US Air Force and Navy concept of “AirSea Battle” in the Western Pacific could entail strikes on the Chinese mainland that might provoke a nuclear response.

You seem to of the opinion that the ends justifies the means, at least concerning the actions of the NSA.

I don't often say this, but your opinion is flat out wrong. We have no evidence that the NSA was not abusing the information they collected without congressional oversight. We have no evidence that their intruding into the lives of citizens from the US and other countries helped stop anything.

All we have evidence of is that the NSA lied to congress and was illegally surveying a large percentage of the world, without authorization.

Snowden did everyone a favor, and while he should perhaps be punished, it should be with time served for having to be on the run. He did the people of the US a favor, and that is not treason or espionage.

Restoring the balance of power is ultimately a good thing, so yes, sweet.Besides, what is wrong of being a former career KGB officer? I mean, Shrub the Elder used to be the director of CIA, not just a career officer.

What he's basically done is take the calculations form the Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer and draw circles on Google Maps. A good first step, but really, not particularly useful.

A decent model woulda) take into account terrain (there are all the databases, and a simple approximation for shadowing isn't all that tough. You don't need to model the shockwave over ground, for instance, but the flash is important for large yield devices.b) do fallout analysis based on climatological model for winds. Easily available databases (NCAR reanalysis project for instance)

This is a relatively boring app. It's drawing circles on Google Maps based only on estimates of yield, height, and level of destruction. I wanted to see the effects of geography and prevailing weather patterns on the distribution of destruction.

You can click on "Fallout" to see prevailing weather patterns taken into account.

I don't think so... In all the tests I tried, the "fallout" was always in the North-East direction.You can change the direction manually, but of course that's completely arbitrary unless you already know which are the "prevailing weather patterns".

Perhaps the 3D version considers land countours - I haven't tried it.

Maybe. But I couldn't get it to work in Safari nor in Chrome, even though I have the Google Earth plugin working quite well with both browsers.

Not that local then? My 6th grade teacher told the class if the emergency sirens every went off for real he'd go outside and face the air base because he didn't want to survive that blast. He probably wouldn't have either way, we were pretty much right on ground zero of any potential nuking. No one was going to fucking duck and cover in that classroom.

If you're into that sort of thing you can find some nifty footage of the old atomic blasts back in the day on youtube. They're pretty impressive. People use

Back when Ronny Raygun was president a friend and I were on the way home in Seattle. He turned on the radio and the Emergency Broadcast System alert was on. He pushed a button to select a different channel, which was also the EBS. I pushed another button, and we heard the EBS again. He muttered, "May as well watch Bremerton melt down," and took the next off ramp. Then the end of the test was announced, and we realized that two stations had run the test simultaneously, and I had accidentally returned th

I dropped one at the base of the Garrison Dam in ND - it said there'd only be 220 fatalities. In reality the destruction of a dam holding back that much water would wipe several cities off the map as the wave + flood took out city after city that was downstream...

Who cares about blast radius estimates? We did that sort of thing when talking about nuclear weapons in 7th grade civics classes. I want something that takes secondary chain-reaction sort of damage into account, such as hitting dams, nuclear power

Did you mean "geography"?
I agree, it would be very interesting to have the topologies of hilly areas like Seattle and SF taken into account in the sim. Let's say you set off your nuke over Elliot Bay. Or in a shipping container down on the south end. I wonder if the neighborhoods on the lee side of the central ridge separating the city from the lake would be spared in any big way. Places like Mt. Baker, Leschi, Madison Park. I wonder if N. Queen Anne would be partially spared? It would be ironic if

There was a publication by the Strategic Bombing Survey after WWII called "The Effects Of Atomic Weapons On Hiroshima And Nagasaki". I believe it's available online now, and it covered that question fairly well. Flat Hiroshima was almost universally flattened in a circle centered on Ground Zero. Hilly Nagasaki had pockets of un-devastated buildings in the lee of hills. SAC later took this into account in its targeting, making sure that air bursts were high enough to cover all terrain. A cargo container

What's the largest bomb that could be loaded into the elevators at the Washington monument? Send one up to the top and detonate, and it should do good damage to the White House and Congress. Or a smaller one on the steps of Congress in a joint session with presidental address.

Yes, sadly, this would have the opposite of the desired effect. People would be scared to run for office, so the only people who would consider running would be people who really wanted to rule—the power-hungry—which is slightly worse than the system we have now.

What is needed is a means of somehow leveling the playing field so that people without lots of money can run for office and stand a chance of winning. The details are left as an exercise for the reader.

Bertrand Russell said something on the order of (highly paraphrased, and I can't find the original quote), "When you have elections there are two kinds of people who will run; those who are in it for the power, and those who are in it for the money. Under no conditions do you want those type of people in charge. What we need is a system to select people who don't WANT the job."

I was going to mode this up, but you lacked a link to the story. I'm curious to know what school and too lazy to google it (well okay, I tried [therecord.com] Is this the one you're talking about? It is a little old, but a disgusting story nonetheless.

If a child draws a picture of aliens and says "my daddy went on a trip with them", would they be getting a visit from the DoD? We're losing it... quickly.